1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of digital social networking including social graph representation of social networks and pertains particularly to methods and apparatus for discovering and engaging one or more social graph nodes through Internet gaming activities.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
Digital social networking has evolved to include an abstract concept of social graph representation. A social graph is a representation of a social network at any current point in time via identification of connection types and relationship attributes, also referred to as edge attributes, between network nodes which are usually people that belong to one or more social networks or services like Myspace™, Facebook™, Twitter™, Linkedin™, and others.
Leading businesses in social networking like Facebook™ have made social graph information easy to access by providing application program interface (API) functionality that other social interaction sites may install to enable access to public social graph information about social graph nodes through open source markup languages like XHTML Friends Network (XFN), Friends Of A Friend (FOAF) and Google's Open Social API. The goal of such functionality as described above is primarily to make joining a new network and adding users to the network much easier and more streamlined, and building more friend-aware applications.
By querying the API using a universal resource locator (URL) lookup format, the API performs a lookup in a central repository provided for the purpose and returns social graph node information in accordance with the desired level or depth of the query. A service then may, through the API, suggest to the new user the contacts that exist that the user might wish to ad to the new network.
Another type of social interaction is online gaming where users typically login to a game server and play a selected game or engage a “virtual environment” with other users that may or may not be connected to them as friends, contacts, family, or some other defined relationship or connection type. It has occurred to the inventors that membership to gaming sites might be greatly increased through leveraging social graph information associated to current users of the gaming site discovered from querying a social graph API installed on the gaming site on within the game itself.
Therefore, what is clearly needed is a system and methods for leveraging social graph information associated with a user to provide pre-game social object intelligence (GOI) for identifying and treating other potential gamers or users that have some level of connection to that user in one or more other social networks.